Jim Wilkinson hits golf balls on a quiet corner of Bend’s Broken Top Club.

He looks different from the smattering of recreational golfers warming up alongside him on the range. It’s not just the video equipment nearby or his fundamentally sound golf swing cluing onlookers that Wilkinson is more than an ordinary golfer.

Wilkinson’s sun-weathered face and his sharp sense of humor, no doubt tuned with everyday golf-course banter, also hint at a life spent on the links.

Ask him how old he is and he will reply, “6 under par.” (That would be 66.)

Wilkinson — who grew up in Central Oregon and graduated from Redmond High School in 1964 — in a lot of ways IS golf.

And his love of the sport has made him successful at every facet of the game, including now as a teacher.

“If I didn’t have a passion to do this, I wouldn’t do it,” says Wilkinson, who returned to Central Oregon in May with his wife, Kathy, to teach during summers at Broken Top. “You have to wake up every morning and want to go to work.”

Head professional at Bend Golf and Country Club from 1983 to 1995, the now permanent part-time Bend resident’s golf roots run deep.

He grew up on a golf course: His father, Bill, was the head pro at the old Juniper Golf Course in Redmond and later at what was then known as Prineville Golf and Country Club (now Prineville Golf Club). And he has excelled at different times as an amateur player, a head pro, and a touring pro.

All that experience has helped him in the role at which he may be best: a teacher.

Wilkinson was recently named the teacher of the year in the Oregon Chapter of the PGA of America, becoming the second golf pro in the chapter’s history to win the award four times.

He has worked with pros such as 2008 PGA Championship winner Y.E. Yang, and with PGA Tour veterans Scott McCarron and Charlie Wi. But he is equally comfortable schooling a hacker carrying a 20 handicap.

“It’s no different than being a doctor: Here comes a patient who might be worth 5 million (dollars) and here comes another patient who is not worth anything,” says Wilkinson, who spends about half the year teaching for ultra-exclusive The Vintage Club in Indian Wells, Calif. “You are working with athletes, and sometimes you are trying to get somebody to get the ball airborne. You are trying to take the student that you have and make him better.”

Wilkinson has an old-school way about him. He’s part John Wayne — Wilkinson served in Vietnam in the 1960s — part “Tin Cup.”

And that has made him among the most popular club pros among his peers all around the Pacific Northwest.

“I was eating something and he told me, ‘You shouldn’t eat that, Amy. It’s not healthy,’” recalls Amy Kerle, tournament director for the PGA’s Oregon Chapter.

Reasonable advice, except Wilkinson was smoking a cigarette at the time.

“It was perfect timing,” Kerle recalls. “He’s hilarious.”

His humor is part of what makes Wilkinson such an effective teacher, says Jerry Mowlds, a regional legend who teaches at Pumpkin Ridge near Portland and the only pro to be named Oregon teacher of the year more often than Wilkinson.

Take Wilkinson’s work at The Vintage Club, which Mowlds says is a playground for the West Coast’s moneyed elite.

“Here is this cowboy from little Central Oregon with his down-home speech and demeanor giving these billionaires lessons,” says Mowlds, who first met Wilkinson in 1965 and first gave him lessons in the 1970s. “It’s kind of an oxymoron. But yet it works for him.”

Wilkinson’s bluntness has a way of getting through to just about anybody, according to Mowlds.

“He’s not afraid to say anything and teach people,” Mowlds says. “People in the upper echelon are not used to being teased by their golf pro. But he gives them a little bit of that, and 90 percent of the time it works very well.”

Wilkinson has had plenty of help becoming a top-notch teacher.

It began with his father.

Bill Wilkinson, who died in 1983, gave his son (who moved to Redmond from Seattle at age 9) an insider’s view of the game at an early age.

Jim Wilkinson excelled as a player first. At Central Oregon Community College, and back when the Bend school sponsored an intercollegiate golf program, Wilkinson became a two-time junior college All-American. The honors helped him earn a golf scholarship to the University of Texas-Pan American.

After school he became the head pro at Kah-Nee-Ta starting in 1973, and then for 12 years starting in 1983 he was a pro at Bend Golf and Country Club.

In 1995, he qualified through Q-School for the 1996 Senior PGA Tour.

“I got to play with all the Trevinos, Palmers, and Nicklauses,” recalls Wilkinson, who moved from Bend to California in 1995. “That is something that club pros really don’t get to do. And I was fortunate enough to be able to play well enough at the time that I could go out there and I was competitive.

He calls his experience on the 50-and-older pro golf tour “unbelievable.”

During the second round of his third Senior Tour tournament, the GTE Suncoast Classic in Florida, Wilkinson was paired with Arnold Palmer.

“I walked up to the tee, and I couldn’t even breath,” Wilkinson remembers.

“The very first time you are going to play golf with one of the greatest players to play the game, and you just kind of go, ‘Oh my goodness gracious.’”

Injuries slowed Wilkinson, and he played sparingly after his rookie season until he retired from the Senior Tour after struggling at Q-School in 1999.

That’s when he got serious about teaching.

Wilkinson — who spent the last decade teaching at Langdon Farms in Aurora, south of Portland — has worked closely over the years with Golf Digest Top 100 teachers Jim McLean, Hank Haney and Mowlds.

Like Mowlds, Wilkinson tailors the lesson to each golfer to in an effort to make more solid impact with the ball, he says. And that has helped him get through to golfers of all skill levels.

“I’ve been lucky to be around all these great teachers,” Wilkinson says. “And when I was on the Senior Tour, I soaked up as much as I could from guys who were really good at a specific thing.”

Currently, Wilkinson has a cancerous tumor in his left eye, which was diagnosed more than six years ago. Though it is not a life-threatening ailment, it has taken a toll on his game.

But he does not complain.

“When you get old you have issues,” he says plainly.

Despite the “issue,” he still loves to play.

He walks two or three miles each morning, stretches each day, and swings a heavy golf club to keep limber, he says.

His swing speed still reaches 105 miles per hour. (An average PGA Tour pro swings at about 110 miles per hour.)

“That’s pretty quick for a guy my age,” he says.

Wilkinson always planned to return to Central Oregon “when I slowed down,” he says.

Now with Kathy, his wife of 19 years, Wilkinson could not be happier. He gets to teach at “a nice club,” and he spends his summers where that love sprang eternal.

“Central Oregon is one of the nicest places you can live,” Wilkinson says. “It’s a great place to live.”